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Scientist Raphael Marschall from the MiARD project recently gave a talk to the Bern section of the ‘Astronomy on Tap’ movement that seeks to provide popular science talks with an astronomy theme to the general public in an informal setting. A video of his talk can be seen here, in which he summarises the reasons for studying comets, and his own research using results from the ROSETTA mission.

The latest publication from the MiARD project has just been published in the journal Icarus.

On deviations from free-radial outflow in the inner coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko concerns the way material is transported away from the comet, and compares observations made with the OSIRIS camera to theoretical models of the outflow; the agreement between the models and the observations is good. At the time of writing this paper, the lead author, Selina-Barbara Gerig, was a masters student in the Planetary Imaging Group at the University of Bern. She is now pursuing a PhD, stil at the University of Bern.

The MiARD project has made public a virtual reality viewer (for use with Oculus Rift headsets) that shows off the high resolution shape model of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko derived by the project. The viewer (with slightly downsized shape model) can be downloaded from the project’s Publications and Downloads page. An option allows the geographical regions identified by Thomas et al (2015) Science347(6220) aaa440-1 – aaa0440-6 to be shown.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 686709.

This work was supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract number 16.0008-2. The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official view of the Swiss Government.